[Review] Code Shifter – Nintendo Switch

Code ShifterNintendo Switch

Who doesn’t love a good all-star jam video game? Certainly
Land Ho! and Arc System Works understand the appeal, as shown by their new
release Code Shifter for the Nintendo
Switch. Code Shifter is a classic
platformer that features 8-bit versions of characters from Arc System Works’
library of games including (but not limited to) Blazblue, Guilty Gear, River City Ransom, and Double Dragon. They’re all integrated in
an original, seamless way that makes the game more fun for fans of those series
without being exclusionary towards players that haven’t yet had the pleasure.

Stella! STELLA!

Stella works at Awesome Rainbow Corp with her diverse and
cheery array of coworkers trying to make a game, but a mysterious virus sent by
the even more mysterious hacker Ghost keeps rewriting code and generating bugs.
She whips up a special debugging/antivirus software called – you guessed it –
Code Shifter to eliminate both the bugs and viruses Ghost keeps generating. She
moves through each of her coworkers’ computers one at a time smashing bugs and
trying to unravel Ghost’s motives and identity through her use of Sera, her
virtual avatar in Code Shifter. Along the way, there are a bunch of cutesy
cutscenes that flesh out Stella’s coworkers and generally make for an amusing,
cheerful, but ultimately fairly light story that still mostly satisfies when
it’s over.

I did have one pretty big problem with the game’s story,
however; it kind of makes light of developer crunch time, which is a fairly
serious issue in the game development community. Stella and her friends are
constantly working long hours for a management team that seems to care only
about deadlines, and the programmers working at Awesome Rainbow Corp don’t seem
to take it all that seriously, even as most of them collapse into sleep at
their workstations multiple times throughout the story. It feels kind of gross
to see Stella and her coworkers make themselves so happily complicit in their
own exploitation when we can read about what it does to real people in the same
situation. The game chalks it up to the enthusiasm of a small dev team, but
honestly it’s a handling of the subject that doesn’t sit well with me. Perhaps
I’m being oversensitive, but I feel strongly enough about it that I couldn’t
just let it pass without comment.

Not a Paradigm Shifter, and That’s OK

Sera has all of the abilities you’d expect a platforming
heroine to have; she can run, jump, and attack in a series of combos. Her base
form can double-jump and perform a special attack that does increased damage at
the cost of her health; I hardly ever used her specials because you get graded
in part on how much health you lose during a level, but more on that later. As
you finish the last level of each of your coworkers’ missions, you unlock a new
costume for Sera that has a new special attack or ability of varying
usefulness. Since, again, I never really used the specials, it was mostly a
cosmetic change for me but the ability to jump higher provided by one of the
costumes was incredibly useful at times.

What really makes the game cool is the ability to change
into characters from Arc System Works’ library of games. Terminals placed throughout
each level contain a character for Sera to transform into. In addition to being
generally far more powerful than Sera, transformable heroes have different
attributes that Sera can use to manipulate or navigate the environment in some
way. Some characters have elemental attributes to their attacks and some gain
special abilities related to their size. Characters with fire attacks can melt
ice and smaller characters can squeeze through tiny passageways, for instance.
It adds a neat little layer of depth to an otherwise straightforward
platformer, but not too much; the heroes contained within the transformation
terminals kind of tip off what you need to be looking out for. If you get a
small character, for example, it means that there is probably a passageway or
something nearby that you’ll need to use them for.

The action is fairly slow-paced for a platformer; the game
doesn’t feel like it reacts as fast as I do, which gets frustrating because I
know for a fact that I’m generally not that fast. Otherwise the difficulty
level is generally pretty balanced. It gets harder the farther you go at a
pretty natural pace, which is good. I have a hard time getting past the pace of
the gameplay myself, however; maybe I’m just spoiled by the time I’ve spent
lately with the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy
Collection, but I prefer a little bit of a faster pace in my action
platformers than what’s on display in Code
Shifter. The game can slow down even farther when Sera is transformed into
another character; some of the transformable heroes feel painfully slow,
especially during boss fights. It’s not that it’s not fun, it just feels like
things could be so much tighter with a quicker pace.

The Rich Get Richer

During the level, Sera can collect data bits, debug
glitches, and defeat enemies (among other things) to build up her score. She
gets graded at the end of each level, and every level except S Rank is
basically pointless. Getting an S rank during missions rewards you with items
you can equip to make Sera stronger. Limiting rewards to S rankings seems like
a questionable choice; if you’re having trouble getting through a mission,
you’re probably not going to get an S ranking. So, in essence, you only get the
power-ups if you do well enough not to need any. I’d get it if they just
reserved the best rewards for S rankings, but getting a power-up for a B or an
A ranking would help players struggling with the harder levels by giving them a
little bit of a boost.

Not-Brief-Enough Intermission

Between missions, players take control of Stella so they can
explore the Awesome Rainbow Corp office. Mostly it exists to flesh out Stella’s
coworkers with small dialogue exchanges. Sometimes – very rarely, like once per
set of coworker missions – they’ll give Stella an item she can equip to Sera.
It’s nice getting these items, but the intermissions are mostly a chore for one
main reason; Stella moves at a pace that would make a snail impatient. Towards
the end of the game, I found myself skipping intermission interactions in favor
of just going to the next level because I didn’t want to limp around the office
with Stella for a minor bit of non-essential character development.

Probably the coolest aspect of the intermission sections is
the ability to play Colorful Fighters, the game Stella and her coworkers are
developing. It’s basically an 8-bit Smash
Bros except with Arc System Works characters instead of Nintendo’s
all-stars. You can unlock new fighters for the game in the EX missions that
unlock as you get far enough into debugging each of Stella’s coworkers’ project
folders. Colorful Fighters can be played either with a stock of lives or as a
race to a certain point total, and more importantly, you can play it
multiplayer with friends on your couch. It’s a fun game, but it suffers from
the same slower pace as the main game.

Any Glitched-Out Graphics Are on Purpose

For the main game, the graphics remind me of a higher-end
mobile game. Sera, her office, and the level backgrounds are rendered in a
smooth, attractive, cartoony style that make the game look inviting and
friendly from the word go. The transformable heroes, as well as the entirety of
Colorful Fighters, are instead rendered in a really cool 8-bit aesthetic that,
while visually very different from the main game, manages to look like it fits
into the game world nonetheless. What’s even cooler is that the soundtrack
changes depending on whether you’re just playing as Sera or one of the
transformable heroes. Sera’s soundtrack is electronic, but in a modern way,
whereas the Colorful Fighters tunes are classic, killer 8-bit style versions of
tracks from the characters’ home games. I wish certain parts of the game would
get tweaked, but the art direction has no holes.

Live by the Code, Shift by the Code

Code Shifter delivers a good to great experience on basically all levels. The graphics and sound direction are easily the game’s strongest recommendation, and they do manage to mostly paper over the game’s main fault. While the gameplay is fairly balanced in terms of a natural difficulty progression, the pace of the game is just a little too slow for my tastes. That’s not to say that it’s bad in any way, it would just feel more satisfying if things were a little faster. Still, the ability to transform into different characters from Blazblue and River City Ransom is a cool enough idea to pick up some of the slack in that area. Throw in a side game in Colorful Fighters that is almost fulfilling enough to be a standalone release, and you’ve got a game that will feel right at home in the collection of any gamer who loves platforming.